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Memories of Dartmouth

This Tuesday Poetry Post comes via a holiday greeting from Dartmouth College. Although a fraternity brother of mine, I don’t know Jack Bolger. He graduated a lifetime after me and is now serving as a Marine Corps officer.

But the way he speaks about Dartmouth and Hanover hits very close to home:

For what is a college but a transitory way station,an ephemeral experience that can only be had once?

The beauty of this time in our lives is that it is so fleeting and precious,but we don’t usually appreciate it that way.

In carelessness is joy, in ignorance bliss.

I’d like to believe that these will not be the greatest years of my life, and that the best is yet to come, but I don’t know how I could possibly have more fun.

I’ve watched meteors burn across the universe on the golf course, shivering in a blanket with friends.

I’ve basked in the waters of the Connecticut at sunset, and watched the remains of the day bleed out into the treetops.

I’ve gotten lost on the trails along the Connecticut River, wandering deep into the streambeds beneath the whispering pines.

I’ve seen black moose gallop through the snow up north and watched deer walk silent as ghosts across Rip Road late at night.

I’ve started to notice things about you, Dartmouth.

How quiet you are in the early mornings before dawn has painted you with the colors of the day.

How eerie you are on weekday nights during the witching hour, when mist wreathes your streets and magic seems to walk abroad.

How serene the campus seems in the dark of a winter’s afternoon, buildings and grounds all draped in snow, woodsmoke perfuming the sky.

I love how cozy this place feels, all tucked in, safe and sound and warm, even though the wolf-wind maybe be wailing at the doorways, and the snow drifts deep along the road.

By Jack Bolger ’13 first published by The Dartmouth, May 23, 2013

To view the holiday greeting, click here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7uQp8O6K94&feature=youtu.be

The Blank Page

When I was in the fourth grade, Miss Nichols introduced a new girl to our class named Laurie MacElhenny. She had brown hair, hazel-green eyes, freckles and more importantly, a father named, Hugh. Also known as “Crazy Legs MacElhenny,” Hugh MacElhenny, was a celebrated open-field running back signed by the New York Giants. They had just moved to our small town. The news of Laurie and her father rippled through Todd Elementary School in a wave of whispers that could defy the speed of any technology available today. And, of course, every boy in the fourth grade immediately fell in love with her, myself included.

This was no hormonal crush. I was only nine at the time – there wouldn’t be a whiff of testosterone until I was well into the eighth grade – but my “love” for Laurie was no less intoxicating. I, and the rest of the fourth grade boys, had a fixation on her that was all consuming. None of us ever spoke of this to her, of course. In those days, we loved from afar. But, she was all I/we could think about. I even wrote a poem.

Not a good idea when you have two older brothers.

I knew it was risky. They were always on the lookout for any sign of weakness they could exploit. But I was confident. The poem was safely hidden away, one among three hundred sheets of white, lined paper bound inside my mammoth, grey, three-ring, school binder.

“What were you writing the other day?”

“Nothin.”

“I saw you.”

“It was nothin.”

“Gimme that notebook.”

Still, I was cool. There was no way they would flip through every page. They didn’t have the patience. My face was a mask of unconcern.

Until they found it. And started reading it aloud. With every bit of drama worthy of Elizabethan actors. To this day I can still feel the flush of my cheeks turning crimson.

I learned at an early age that while our thoughts are our own, what is put down on paper is for everyone.

And therein lies the nature of writer’s block. You. Will. Be. Judged. In the mind, our thoughts are free to float and swirl with reckless abandon. Ideas ebb and flow like the tides. Suppositions and arguments twist with the winds of our subconscious. Distilling these myriad notions into one thought, one focus, one sentence is a declaration. It says, “This is who I am. This is what I believe.” Writing defines us.

And that can be a scary. When I first sat down to write Anvil of God, I didn’t know where to start. I tried to imagine a scene between Charlemagne’s father and the last of the Merovingian Kings…just to create some character interaction. Four hours later, I shut down the computer. I was shaking. The characters had run amok and the scene I had written was so disturbing that I couldn’t look at it for three days. I had written that? (It still scares me).

I understood then what writers talk about when referring to their “muse.” (Okay, mine is a dark muse, but it’s still a muse). When I had recovered from the shock, I knew there was no going back. Writing opens a window to the soul.

And yet we do it. We put ourselves down on paper, knowing that we will be judged.

It takes an enormous act of hubris. What could I possibly have to write that is worthy of being read? It’s a very high bar.

Hence the blank page.

Poetry in Primetime

I had intended to post something more mainstream in my first “Tuesday Poetry Post” but was surprised to find a slice of poetry in primetime on”The Blacklist” the other night. It was delivered quite well by James Spader’s character Reddington :

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Have you ever sailed across an ocean

On a sailboat surrounded by sea

With no land in sight –

Without even the possibility of sighting land – for days to come?

To stand at the helm of your destiny?

I want that one more time.

I want to be in the Piazza del campo in Siena

To feel the surge of ten racehorses go thundering by.

I want another meal in Paris at L’Ambroisie at the Place des Vosges.

I want another bottle of wine

And then another.

I want the warmth of a woman and the cool set of sheets,

One more night of jazz at the Vanguard.

I want to stand on summits and smoke Cubans

And feel the sun on my face

For as long as I can.

Walk on the wall again.

Climb the tower.

Ride the river.

Stare at the frescoes.

I want to sit in the garden and read one more good book.

Most of all I want to sleep.

I want to sleep like I slept when I was a boy.

Give me that.

Just one time.

Long-term Memories

Thanksgivings are for memories. Here’s one.

We used to wrestle with my father. And despite the fact that we had numbers on our side, it was always a suicide mission. We’d throw ourselves at his great tree-trunk legs, trying to bring him down and he would swat us aside like Godzilla dispensing with the Japanese army.

Eventually, he would end up on the floor (probably to prevent crushing one of us) and we would swarm over him, Lilliputians trying to hold him down. In the end, he would stack us up, one on top of the other, holding us down with one hand while tickling us with the other. He would laugh until tears came out of his eyes.

As we grew older, we could compete on size as well as strength. And there were more of us – six to be exact – with my sister Jean and my youngest brother Bean, every bit a part of the carnage. My older brothers and I would leap off chairs and the living room couch to cling to my father’s back while the littler ones tried to trip up his legs. I distinctly remember my mother positioning herself in front of the new color television set to ensure that no one put a foot through it.

It was still a one-sided affair. My dad had this ju-jitsu-style move he had learned in the Marine Corps that he employed to overcome any and all attacks. No one was immune. His hands would spin in an odd-figure eight maneuver and we were forever at his mercy. It always ended the same – bodies strewn everywhere – all of us collapsed in laughter.

Now that we are grown, agreement is rare in my family. We don’t share the same political views, work in the same profession or even all practice the same religion. Some live on the east coast, some on the west, some in the north, some in the south. “All Chiefs, no Indians,” my mother often says.

Yet deep down, we know we are still connected – indelibly bonded by a decades-old, suicide mission to wrestle my father to the ground and make him laugh until the tears came out of his eyes. We few. We very few…

What Do We Tell the Children?

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

Eyes – The opening lines of Loita by Vladimir Nabokov,

Sex, or the promise of sex, has permeated literature since the days of Tristan and Isolde. So much so, that I can ‘t imagine one without the other. D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Philip Roth, Harold Robbins, (I could go on). So, as an author, I always assumed it was part of the craft and part of my job.

I never considered, however, the effect that writing a book with sex scenes in it might have on the people around me. Say, for example, my children.

“I don’t have enough money to pay for the therapy it will take to remove those scenes from my head,” says my youngest (who at last counting is 24 years old).

Another son complained that at a weekly poker game with his buddies, one of his friends asked, “What’s up with your dad?”

His friend pulled out Anvil of God and started reading aloud one of the more graphic scenes.“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Gleason,” A young family friend said the other day, shaking his head. “After reading all these sex scenes, this book is suddenly becoming about you.”

My neighbor tried to put a cheerful face on it. “I’m still on Chapter 2…and already hooked on the family drama, the disturbing church-imposed penance, and a lusty masturbation scene! LOL!”

I’m getting a wide berth from the girls their age. “Wowser!” said one. “I had no idea.” Even people my age are thrown for a loop. “It’s saucy,” my old boss says. “I didn’t know you had it in you.”

The only ones who apparently aren’t wigged out by the experience are my mother’s friends.

“It’s ‘saucy,’” I warned my mother’s neighbor, Peggy. “I just want to make sure you know what you’re getting into.”

She winked at me and smiled. “I’ve been an adult now for a few years,” she said. “I think I can handle it.”